Crews quarantine Delta Airliner at Midway for bug bites

Chicago
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Delta Flight 3163 was quarantined at Chicago's Midway Airport because a passenger had a skin rash. Turns out it was just insect bites.

The plane sat on the tarmac for 2 hours after landing at Chicago's Midway Airport at 3:45 pm Central Time.

The crew of the plane had noticed that a female passenger had a suspicious skin rash and emergency crews quarantined the plane while examining the woman. Fire department crews surrounding the aircraft on the tarmac which raised panic levels with the passengers.

The passenger was reportedly traveling from Ghana, Africa and it turned out she was merely suffering from bug bites.

The Center for Disease control joined in to assess the threat level while the aircraft sat on the tarmac unconnected to the gate for 2 hours.

Once they had established that 50-year-old Lise Sievers of Red Wing, Minn. had nothing more than harmless bed-bug bites, passengers were released at 6:00 pm.

Passenger David Grover was quoted by CBS as saying: “There was a good amount of panic and disbelief.”

However, once passengers realized that the situation was not dangerous, the panic turned into humor.

Kayla Maree Sanders, one of the passengers, tweeted photos and updates as the drama unfolded. Her first tweet read “Midway delta flight nightmare!”, and later she tweeted “They say it's not serious” but that the plane was “still in quarantine.”

Another passenger, Apeksha Gulvady told reporters after leaving the plane that “Initially everyone was just covering their mouth just to make sure we were not breathing something weird.”

No other flights were affected at the airport, which is Chicago's second largest after O’Hare International.